Liberal Talk Radio

Wondering WTF the Israelis are thinking with this apparently over the top campaign in Lebanon? Some thoughts occurred to me, in the form of the several run-on sentences below: Assuming that I understand the recent situation correctly, UN Security Council Resolution 1559 called for the Syrian military to leave Lebanon, and for all armed militias [...]

Daniel Byman has a worthy article in Slate on the subject, which is especially relevant if the U.S. is indeed trying to cleave Syria and Iran. Elsewhere in Slate, John Dickerson makes the case that the President should swear more often.

The Professor asks why Bush declines to make an issue out of axes of evil after laying the groundwork for so long and hard when no one believed him. Simple answer: because he doesn’t need to — Iran/Syria are making that case for themselves! More complicated answer: because perhaps there’s some mega-earth shattering diplomacy in [...]

Even if some are unsure whether it has much to do with Iran or Syria (oh, well if Kevin Drum says so . . .), some Middle East countries are certainly acting as if that’s the case, even going as far as publicly chastising Hezbollah, the inference being that regional geopolitics are behind this: With [...]

While we’re all worried about cesnsorship in China, the other billion-person emerging economic giant has quietly started banning blogs: India’s Department of Telecommunications (DoT) passed an order to ISPs Friday to block several websites. The list is confidential. Indian ISPs have been slowly coming into compliance. SpectraNet, MTNL, Reliance, and as of Monday afternoon, Airtel. [...]

Not to diminish what is a very, very good thing — and even as a casual news observer, I was excited about it — but is it possible that the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was facilitated by events way beyond U.S. or legitimate Iraqi control? As in what may have happened with Saddam’s sons, [...]

Now that Abbas appears to be forcing Hamas’ hand in staking out a “middle ground,” do we really believe that Israel and the U.S. had “no idea” that Hamas was going to win the parliamentary elections? Recent events make that difficult to believe: The president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, said Thursday that he [...]

The U.S. Government loves cheap Chinese imports, don’t they? After all, isn’t that why we normalized trade relations with China and opened up our markets to their wonderful goods? Well, looks like this free market global paradise isn’t quite all it’s cracked up to be. The State Department went and bought some 16,000 Chinese Lenovo [...]

So much for alienating allies with our unilateral arrogance: The prelude to the Iraq war was a period of intense strain in German-American relations. In his 2002 political campaign, Gerhard Schröder, then the German chancellor, warned against an invasion and vowed that Germany would not participate. President Bush declined to make the customary congratulatory phone [...]

Bruno and I and the rest of the blogosphere spent a lot of time today talking about Port-gate. No wonder Bush is so confident that this deal won’t negatively impact security — he nominated Dubai Ports World executive Dave Sanborn to serve as Maritime Administrator within DoT. As head of MARAD, Sanborn’s responsiblities will include [...]